Are You Overlooking These Three Marketing Goldmines?
Managing a successful marketing program is harder than ever. Every day there is a new tool, tip, or trick (read: shiny object) that distracts your focus. It’s hard to keep up and grow a business at the same time.
The easy solution is to focus your energies on the areas that can generate the most return, upside and revenues for your business. But what are those areas?
They are your customer base, your website homepage, and your email marketing list. These goldmines are areas that you’re most likely taking for granted, or have put some effort into, but they can (and should) be nurtured further.
Your customers
If I asked you who your top three customers are, would you be able to immediately identify them? How about your top 10 percent of customers based on high activity, engagement, or the most purchases made?
In our quest to attract more new customers, we often overlook the ones we already have. But think about it: if you have a segment of customers that’s marked by high engagement and repeat buying, you should be doing everything you can to nurture and grow that segment.
Maximize your relationships with your best customers by trying out one or more of these tactics: exclusive offers for top customers only, beta opportunities for them to be the first to try new products or service features, or a one-question survey to learn more about them.
By doing these things, the engagement from your top customers will grow even stronger, and I’m willing to bet you’d see them buying more.
Another outcome of honing in on top customers is a groundswell of advocates. These are your super fans who pledge their allegiance to your brand and will defend or praise it all costs. The result is that they then become ambassadors and, before you know it, a virtual extension of your marketing efforts.
Your website homepage
The homepage on your website is the front door to your business. It gets more traffic than any other page. It is your brand’s first impression to potential customers. It is the gateway for existing customers to find out more. Because of this, a strategic approach to converting visitors into leads, trials or customers is crucial. This is known as conversion rate optimization.
Optimizing conversions takes work. But don’t fret, it doesn’t have to be a Herculean effort! For instance, you can test something as small as a change in your call to action button. Believe it or not, changing what the button says (e.g., "Learn More About Us" vs. "Try Us Now") or the color of the button (e.g., yellow vs. green) can increase conversions by double digits.
Statistics show that after optimizing their websites, SaaS companies saw a 17 percent increase in customer engagement. As for e-commerce businesses, they saw a 21 percent increase in revenue.
Your homepage should be continuously updated and refreshed to ensure it always contains content that’s relevant to visitors when they show up. More importantly, the homepage should ignite action.
One way to determine whether it’s maximized is to analyze the percentage of people who are converting into customers or to see how many are doing what you desire them to do. If the number is under 5 percent, what are you doing about the other 95 percent? Maybe it’s time to try something new.
Three tests you can easily implement are trying different colors, adding customer testimonials, and creating urgency in your messaging.
Your email marketing list
The final hidden treasure for uncovering missed revenues is your email marketing list. It is the most valuable owned asset that your brand has. Your email audience is your primary means of building and maintaining a one-to-one relationship with your customers.
You might be thinking, “I have a strong email list and I’m sending marketing messages regularly.” This is terrific, but it’s not enough. Just as homepage tests are an important part of growing your business, you should test different aspects of your email marketing efforts.
It could be as simple as trying out different subject lines--for example, a subject line that asks a question versus one that doesn’t. Or, sending a plain text email versus one that is rich in graphics and heavy imagery. As we said before, it doesn’t need to be overly complicated. Simply try different things to see what resonates more with the subscribers.
To get started, try these three simple email tests: personalizing your subject line, testing different kinds of body content, and creating different email landing pages.
Thanks to the digital world in which we live, the opportunities to try new marketing tools and tricks to engage your audience are endless. But don’t let that distract you from using some of the tried-and-true tactics which can bring in potentially huge gains and growth for your business.
Segment your existing customer base to provide more relevant messaging, continually optimize your homepage for more actions, and build stronger engagement, relationships, and trust with your email audience.
